 People with mental illness are recognized as being disabled. I think instead of saying how does mental health affect learning, I would say that the way we learn affects our mental health. At some point of time, all of us in this campus actually wanted a good counsellor. The cost of availing proper treatment that is counselling or going about with proper medicine outside the campus is extremely high. There are only 3,800 odd psychiatrists in the entire country. Counselling can have great effects. I have seen it, I have experienced it. So in my experience, I myself have suffered depression. Like when I was in my third year of college, I went through a really difficult time on my own. And just like not having enough resources and knowing that everything around, like all sorts of therapies around you are so expensive is an issue that I think all of us deal with. In no way can a student coming from a lower financial status or a marginalized background can approach these sort of mechanisms. So the primary stress has to be on building an effective mechanism within campus that would be easier for the students to approach. Not paying so much outside for your health and just like having it for free may be a minimal amount will be great for students, it will be more accessible for everybody. But the present mechanisms on campus are definitely not in any way that approachable. I think only Ambedkar University has got a very free running and quite an effective running health centre, but apart from that none of the universities in Delhi actually addresses these issues. There is a need to create more spaces where the students can just go and if in the moments of despair and sadness and even if they are feeling good and if they want to talk to somebody then there should be some avenues available in the campus where they can go. Universities are twilight zones, you know in between zones where students can find the kind of persons they are, not just necessarily the minds they are. You must be a perfectly normal person, you must be a happy person who has very few problems but the moment you enter AUD you start observing things from a different lens and you start feeling excluded, ideologically, politically, personally, psychologically and at some point if you do not fit in according to certain people, according to certain class, according to certain ideas, you start questioning yourself that am I worth being here? That's the question. Higher academia itself is a very alienating world. So when you are stepping into higher academia there are problems of communication between your campus people and people outside the campus. We often do not get the proper vocabulary to articulate our views. So there is a sense of distancing ourselves from the outside world and living in this world as an environment of our own and even when things don't get very stabilised in this particular world it affects the students as a whole. So I think that there is a disconnect because often academics finds is disconnected from experience. So for example at Ambedkar when we launched this MA and M. Philan psychology our effort was to connect walks of life with human lived experience. That's why we called it the school of human studies. You know that how does a woman experience herself? How does a Dalit experience himself? How does a child experience themselves? And how does somebody who never fits in? You know, somebody who always feels that I'm a little different and honestly I think a lot of us came to psychology because we felt very misfits. In a campus like JNU or HCU which is a central university campus and people coming from different sections of the society the issues of mental health does not restrict itself to its immediate environment. A lot of other issues also get involved with mental health like issues of discrimination. Supposedly a person coming from a marginalised section when he or she comes here and comes in contact with the so-called upper elite section of the society a lot of issues, a lot of self-confidence issues, expression issues develop in them and we have seen how in these campuses these issues have taken the form of severe depression. Moreover I know people who have been through identity crisis and generally may be due to performance pressures and peer pressures. Why do I say what I say? It has to be justified in my lived experience. For example, like now with these suicides that are happening with so many overt discriminations of caste they're not covert anymore. I don't think these things are necessarily verbalisable. The hurt is so unconscious and the prejudice is so deep that it takes generations for it to change. So at best what we can do is letting in voices, letting in as many multiple voices not just in the classroom but also the multiple voices within me. So one part of me says that, yeah, I'm a Hindu and I hate Muslims and one part of me says, how can you think like this? So we ourselves are not unitary beings. We ourselves are beings who think different things at different points of time. At repression of particular ideas, that repression of particular feelings, particular expression because of the pressure of academia, the pressure of peer pressure because of certain ideologies that are dominant and that are rightiest in certain ways. People felt that they are not able to express their selves. We do have one mental health counsellor and one psychiatrist present on the campus but it cannot in any way cater to a student's strength of 8000. The government health ministry considered that there are only 3,800 odd psychiatrists in the entire country. It's not in the government sector, it's both in the public and the private sector. The point is that you need to have a good setup and a big one so that you can deal with the amount of students that have mental issues these days. From where we come from, right, it's like we don't know what repression is. We don't know what anxieties are. We don't know that feeling bad about something, feeling depressed about something is actually a clinical thing. We don't know that. The idea that we need to normalize is that if you have a body, you are going to get some bodily sickness so you have a mind, you are going to get mentally ill as well. So if you are developing some mental health issues, it is always good to go see a doctor for that. First you develop this idea that it is okay to develop mental health issues and there are ways to address that. Families don't recognize in the first place that there is a mental health issue with their children or within the family somebody has got. They don't recognize it. Even if they come to recognize it, they don't go for treatment. First place is not a psychiatrist by the way. You always go to a Tantri or you go to a temple or some faith healer or something like that. After exhausting all these mechanisms only, then you try to go to a psychiatrist if available. If suppose I were at a job and I were at the end of six hours to give you a product or to make a software, then you would think that I am productive. But if I am here over four or five years and I am trying to write a thesis which perhaps not everybody will easily understand and I have to communicate and people think what are they doing and at every level from the bureaucracy to journal publication, to applying for a teaching position outside it is very difficult to communicate the nature of the job that you are doing. And with this present Vice Chancellor, he acts like students are criminals. I mean he acts like student, you must have made a mistake, so you didn't submit, you must have made a mistake, so you didn't publish the journal. And if you look at it, it is usually your friends, your family that increasingly steps in and fills that vacuum. Because the university is withdrawing, the market is withdrawing, you don't have jobs and you are usually falling back on your friends and on your family to fill that vacuum. So I think that the role of university is the role of teaching, the role of any relationship has to be to be able to help the person translate a bodily somatic experience or a completely intellectual experience into something that is verbalizable, something that is simple to talk about. I think that most of the time when a student enters in college life, he is struggling with the relational aspect, like how to deal with parents, how to deal with new friends and at times it is too overwhelming and he might feel like that he is not capable enough to deal with it. So if he will have an awareness about mental health, he can know what is going right or wrong with himself. Students are burgeoned with their academics, they are burgeoned with their career choices. So there is no environment of free communication, once that happens I am pretty sure a lot of crimes, a lot of suicide attempts and probably a lot of authentic depression cases would go down if there is a healthy communication channel to communicate how you are suffering.